Development activities
As referred, the intelligent building concept integrates contributions from different agents. Figure 1 presents several development activities associated with the implementation of the intelligent building concept, identifying three main activity groups, each one of them associated with different groups of persons, from project teams to users.
Figure 1 Development activities within the Intelligent Building concept
The first activity group, at the top of Figure 1, named as “development”, is associated with systems development. The goal of this group of activities is two-fold: on one hand, to assure the development of the different sub-systems to be installed at the building, produced by different groups of designers and system’s architects, and on the other hand, to assure that those systems can interact and that we can benefit from interoperability between those systems.
The activity group referred at the bottom of Figure 1, named as “execution”, is responsible for the real-time operation of the building systems. Main agents interacting with these systems include managers, owners and users.
Assuring the convenient bridge between the two previously referred activity groups, we can identify, at the middle of Figure 1, the “configuration” group. Activities within this group are of major importance to support incremental implementations, changes in the building and dynamic reconfigurability of building resources.
Among their responsibilities, we can refer to system’s version control, smooth transitions between system versions (hopefully transparent to the users), easy installation of new systems, and easy resource reconfiguration.
Modelling views
From a general point of view, one may consider two types of modelling goals:
- In the first group, the specific goal is the specification; here, the characterisation of the system will be accomplished from an external view, like in a “black-box” characterisation (i.e. when one does not need to know internal details, but only in- and output descriptions);
- In the second one, the specific goal is the support to design/implementation; here, it is necessary to know the detailed internal model characteristics.
In Figure 2, the four most important views (from the information technologies point of view) are identified: behavioural, functional, structural and information system. They have to be seen as complementary views of the same complex system, the intelligent building, enabling specific support for the different activities of modelling, specification, implementation and usage.
Figure 2 Different views for building modeling
The “functional” view is an example of “modelling for specification”, while the “behavioural” and “structural” views can be included in the “modelling to design” group.
In the “behavioural” view all the models associated with the control of the different devices and resources are included. As far as the installed computational systems can be tremendously heterogeneous, ranging from user-interfaces to embedded systems, the ways to describe their behaviours can also be very dissimilar.
That is one problem that can be solved through the use of common formalisms and uniform development process (as the ones being prepared by OMG – Object Management Group, www.omg.org). In the “structural” view, the models related with hardware and software architectures are described.
In the “functional” view, descriptions of activities and processes are included, in terms of list of procedures or data-flow diagrams. The “information systems” view includes the data/information models.
Development phases
From the development process point of view, we can identify five phases, which can be roughly associated with the development time line presented in Error! Reference source not found., considering the flow development/configuration/execution (and that are close to the “regular” phases used for development of electronic systems and software in general terms): conception, design, implementation, installation, and operation/maintenance.
From the point of view of the human participants associated with each one of the referred phases, we can refer to architects, engineers, owners, managers, users, among others. The first referred participants is mainly associated with the first group of referred phases, while the last referred participants are mainly associated with the last phases.
As different groups are involved, it is normal to expect that different views and different “languages” are present. In this sense, usage of common (neutral) representations is fundamental to assure interchange of information among different groups and interoperability between systems. So, modeling and standardization tasks are crucial to accomplish the desired functionality.
Standards needed
The intelligent building concept is intrinsically a multidisciplinary one. It is expected that the different communities involved with the different project processes have different views and practices about the most adequate formalisms, models and tools to be used.
Anyway, even using different methods and tools, all project groups should contribute to the global specification of the building, as presented in Figure 3, where specific applications are in charge of translation particular representations associated with the different tools and build up a global specification based on standards, relying in neutral representations for the information and allowing their usage by different applications (focusing on interoperability).
Figure 3 Integration of development activities using standards as neutral representations